


i hope you're somewhere praying

by ignitesthestars



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Agony, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood, F/M, Forehead Kisses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-04-21 06:59:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14279511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: Mal’s blood is on his hands.Alina knows she’s supposed to be doing something. Knows that there's a murder she has to commit, knows that she needs to at least kill one man right this day. But Mal’s blood is on the Darkling’s hands and while most of her is focussing on the corpse of her dead lover, on trying desperately to make himnot a corpse, there is a part of her that whispers:That’s supposed to be mine.





	1. Chapter 1

Mal’s blood is on his hands.

Alina knows she’s supposed to be doing something. Knows that there's a murder she has to commit, knows that she needs to at least kill one man right this day. But Mal’s blood is on the Darkling’s hands and while most of her is focussing on the corpse of her dead lover, on trying desperately to make him _not a corpse_ , there is a part of her that whispers:

_That’s supposed to be mine._

“Alina.” His voice muffles the world as it wraps around her, a mockery of comfort. “He’s gone.”

“You killed him.” Her voice is too loud in her own ears. Mal’s blood is on her hands, too. She fumbles with his chest like she can reach in and grasp his heart, force it to beat again. He’s still warm under her touch. Still real.

“You forced my hand.” 

He’s reaching for her. It’s dark in the Shadowfold, like her body has forgotten that light can exist in the world, but she knows he’s coming.She should lean away, or run, or strike back. She should burn them all to the fucking ground. But he’s reaching for her with Mal’s blood on his hands and when his fingers curl around her chin she

lets it happen.

“Don’t.”

He doesn’t listen. He smears his thumb over her lips, slick and bitter and she would think about throwing up if she could think at all. There’s a blaze in her gut, a roiling mess of heat searing up her throat, ready to burst out of her mouth if it can only pry her teeth apart. 

She can’t see his face, but she knows he’s smiling. A second hand strokes her hair. A kiss brushes her forehead, gentle, intimate. Mal’s blood is on his hands because Mal is dead, and she hadn’t even been the one to kill him.

“It’s done,” the Darkling tells her. “You can waste this time hating me, or you can let go now. The rest of your friends will be safe. We can rule in peace.”

He feels full of wonder. This is hundreds of years of planning and hoping and cruelty culminating in a single instant , and saints, what an idiot he’d made of her with his pretence at any other kind of emotion. What a desperate fool she’s been this whole time.

The Darkling bends over her crumpled form, a farcical benediction. Like he has the right. Like there’s anything left in this world that he could give her.

Alina opens her mouth, and burns.

-

The world is white, and it is nothing. 

She feels, distantly, the Darkling’s attempt to control it. But the world is wide and was never meant to have a master; the darkness swells at the edges of her and breaks. Or maybe she tears it apart. She thinks she might be screaming.

 _No._ It’s on the very edges of her consciousness, a voice that isn’t hers. _Don’t!_

She’s never heard him panic before. She’d take pleasure in it, if she could take pleasure in anything. If she existed as anything other than a vessel for the world to move through on its way to resetting itself.

As abruptly as it starts, it’s over.

-

Alina blinks.

Mal is dead. She knows because he’s gone, his body reduced to so much ash and blown away on the wind. There’s a hollow place inside her where that’s supposed to hurt, but she suspects that if she looks at it too closely, she’ll curl up there and never leave. 

She looks at Aleksander instead. 

He’s on his knees. Prostrate now where he’d thought to make himself her king. The sun is weak and filmy overhead, a poor substitute for the power lingering in her veins. There had been a thread of darkness between them once, tying the two of them together, but that’s gone with the Shadowfold now.

Alina stands. She steps towards him with her hand outstretched, curls her fingers under his jaw. “Look at me.”

His eyes are closed, face wretched. She digs her nails into the soft skin under his throat.

“ _Look at me_.”

It takes a second or it takes forever, she doesn’t care which. That cool mask which has in turn mocked and appraised her is shattered, and she’s left with this - this man. Grey eyes rimmed red, a mouth open but slack, finally at a loss for the right words to torture her with. 

And maybe that’s the worst part. He has hollowed her out and left her in pieces and doesn’t even have the decency to stay standing in the end. She has nothing to push back against. Nothing to rage at, to fight, to distract herself from the endless stretch of reality before her.

“Kill me,” he whispers. “Alina.”

She releases him. There’s a wildness about him now as she steps back, away, disgusted with the both of them - his hands scrabble for her wrist, her robes, some small piece of her that’s willing to stay. They’re red and rusted with dried blood.

“ _Alina_.” 

There’s real terror in his voice now. She’s walks, picking up speed. Away from him, the smudge of black against the rolling grey sands that used to lurk in the Shadowfold. There’s movement in the distance by his broken skiff.

Mal’s blood is on her hands. Her fingers spark with warmth.

If they weren’t her people before, they will be now.


	2. Chapter 2

“You left him alive.”

Alina bristles at his tone, which only draws Nikolai’s frown deeper. It’s uncomfortably warm in the tent, at least for him; she watches a bead of sweat form at his temple, drip down to his jaw.

“I didn’t kill you when you were munching on villagers either,” she snaps. Guilt chases the words almost immediately, but she bites back any apology. If she starts having regrets now, she’ll lie down and never get up again.

The tension in Nikolai’s jaw screws tighter, but he says nothing. Either to let her suffer in her own cruelty, or because she’s legitimately shocked him. She can’t tell which, and doesn’t especially care.

“What do you think is a greater punishment to a man like that? He wanted power, now he has none. Death would be a relief, you know it would.”

“It’s not about punishment, Alina, it’s about what’s best for Ravka. Power isn’t just about summoning shadows from nothing or burning the world down--”

“Do you really believe that?” The heat is getting oppressive. She barely feels it, but she can see Nikolai winding his discomfort back, tucking it under the mask of a king. “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want him to suffer.”

He stands. There’s a wet sheen on his face now (her fault), but he does meet her eyes, unblinking.

“I’m king now,” he says. “What I want doesn’t matter.”

-

She doesn’t marry him. There’s mixed trepidation and relief in his face when they return to Os Alta and she lets her intentions be known. It hurts, sort of, that he doesn’t trust what she’ll do without the leash of his ring on her finger.

But her hands are stained red with Mal’s blood and she has had enough leashes for a lifetime. She tells Nikolai that she has no plans to take the crown, no interest in ruling, and he gives her the benefit of believing her, at least to her face.

She suspects he will have people working on how to counter a walking human weapon before the coronation even happens, and decides not to blame him. _I’m king now_. It means putting Ravka first.

Alina burns things when she touches them, these days. Better to keep her away from the throne entirely.

-

Genya keeps her supplied in sleeping draughts when Healers would make disapproving noises at her. She breathes light and heat and thinks that those Healers would change their tune if they had seen what happened to her mattress the first night she woke up with nightmares.

 _Mal’s blood is on her hands_. The worst part is when she wakes up and her hands are still red. No amount of scrubbing has rid her of the stains, and there’s no bracelet of bone around her wrist even as her footsteps scorch the earth when she’s not paying attention.

She’d made the Darkling’s punishment life. Sometimes she wonders if the world hasn’t made the same decision for her.

It’s almost a relief when she dreams of him instead. A dark satisfaction curls in her gut at the memory of her name in his mouth next to all that terror, and isn’t that better than being empty?

(It’s not. It’s why she asks Genya for the sleeping draughts, and probably why Genya keeps giving them to her).

-

She doesn’t mean to murder all those Fjerdans.

It’s more kindness than they gave her. They came to kill Grisha, driven on by rumours of a Saint who would bring an end to centuries of Fjerdan aggression. Alina had gone to meet them, either to attempt conversation, or give a warning.

She surveys the blighted land before her. There had been snow before, trees, the clear signs of a dirt road. It’s all black now, bereft of even the skeletons of the men who had come.

“Well,” Zoya says from next to her, “I suppose that’s one way of letting them know we won’t be letting them go.”

Alina turns away from her and throws up. Her skin burns like she’s running a fever, but Zoya’s hand is cool on the back of her neck anyway. There’s no posturing amongst her Grisha these days, especially not the ones who were there in the Fold with her when the world ended.

She’ll give them her power, and they give her everything else. Sometimes she thinks she hears the Darkling’s soft laughter in the back of her skull, _see how easy it is to control them all_ swirling around her head. She’s not sure if it’s better to imagine the thought coming from him, or herself.

“I might have just started a war,” she croaks, smearing the back of her hand over her mouth as she straightens. Tolya silently holds a waterskin out to her; she accepts it gratefully. 

Zoya’s shrugs elegantly, hair rippling with the gesture. “They thought to poach a bear cub and got the mother instead. It is not your job to protect enemy states from their own poor decision making.”

People had screamed when the Fold enveloped Novokribirsk, but this had been a silent apocalypse. Does she really have the moral high ground? Or is it just because the victims were Fjerdan this time, instead of Zoya’s aunt?

Alina turns away from the devastation. She supposes it doesn’t matter, now it’s done.

-

Of course, that’s when _parem_ shows up.

Terror shudders through Alina as David explains the effects to the war council, and it takes every inch of self control she has left to not burn the whole place down. Nikolai takes one look at her face, confirms that they’re not in any immediate danger from the drug, and dismisses the meeting.

“Tell me you’ve found him,” she rasps. Her fingers are white knuckled clenching the table, which is starting to smoke.

“Do you know how much that cost?” Nikolai asks mildly. A fissure cracks right down this middle of it; he sighs. “Right. No, Alina. There’s been no sign of him. You know I’d tell you if there was.”

She does him the courtesy of letting go of the table, but all they do is look at each other in silence. She _doesn’t_ know that, and he’s not fool enough to think otherwise.

“Well,” he says. “I’m telling the truth now, how about that?”

She doesn’t trust him because he’s earnest about it. She trusts him because she knows what he looks like when he lies to her these days, and there’s no sign of that harsh majesty about him now. He looks tired, in fact, and in that moment all of the heat runs out of her.

“Now’s probably a terrible time to say ‘I told you so’, isn’t it?”

Alina snorts, rubbing a hand over her face. “And here I thought you were all about picking your moment.”

“Oh, I think you and I know each other well enough by now for me to just come out and say it.”

She throws a scrunched up piece of parchment at him in lieu of setting anything on fire, and he lets it hit him in appreciation.

“I don’t regret it,” she says eventually. She even thinks it’s true.

“No, you’re not in the business of regrets these days.” She makes a face, and he shrugs. “I’m not in the business of lying to you. This is exactly what I was afraid of.”

“A scientifically enhanced drug that allows Grisha to access power beyond their wildest imagination?”

“ _Power_ , Alina. And it falling into his hands again.” Nikolai pinches the bridge of his nose. “Do you think he’ll use it? If he gets his hands on it?”

That’s the real question, isn’t it? That, and ‘what happens if he does’. Alina stares at her red, red hands for long enough that she half expects Nikolai to leave in disgust, but he simplys waits for her. Until she has an answer for him.

“Before all of this? There would have been no way.”

“And now?”

 _And now?_ Alina remembers her name in his mouth, Mal’s blood on his hands, his terror and her satisfaction as she’d left him behind.

“Let’s hope that he doesn’t get his hands on it.”

-

She doesn’t take her sleeping draught that night. 


	3. Chapter 3

It starts with a whisper in her dreams.

‘Nightmares’ is probably more applicable. She misses the thick blanket of nothing Genya’s draughts had laid over her, the simple comfort of closing her eyes at night and waking up to the sun with no awareness of what had occurred in between.

And yet. Call it a gut feeling or call it paranoia, but something tells her she needs to live through the hazy memory of blood and heat and the despairing sound of her own name (and maybe it’s neither of those things, maybe it’s just a latent self-loathing telling her she hasn’t suffered enough yet). So she sleeps and she dreams and wakes up panting with the thought of red-rimmed grey eyes lingering for too long in her mind.

_Alina._

He had been so afraid. Even now, she remembers that with a certain relish. He had hunted her to the end of life itself, and she can’t regret letting him suffer.

(It’s a ugly feeling. She’s got a lot of those, these days. She lets Genya play dolls with her hair and her face and her clothes, and doesn’t bother looking in the mirror anymore).

_You should have killed me, Alina._

-

“We’re not in any place to start a war.” Nikolai’s expression is grim. “In case you forgot, we just dragged ourselves out of one that decimated most of the army we had to deal with precisely this sort of problem.”

“‘Precisely this sort of problem’ is my people being taken and turned into _weapons and slaves_ , Nikolai.”

He’d taken one look at her face that morning and moved their conversation outside. But Alina is learning control, of her power if not her voice. The grass underfoot stays unburnt, the air disturbed only by a gentle breeze. Nikolai turns his face out to the lake, his hands tucked behind his back.

“Your people,” is all he says.

Grey eyes flash in her memory, or maybe it’s something else these days. His hair mess, sweat-soaked and curled at the ends, half-escaping its usual tie. The face is a collection of sharp, gaunt angles, but she lingers on the strained, smug shape of his mouth. Exhausted and exhilarated all at once.

And then he’s gone, and she’s left with Nikolai.

“I don’t want to be queen. You know that.”

“I do. But I think you don’t want to have a king either, Alina, and that puts me in a rather difficult position, having a crown and all.”

It’s her turn to look at the lake, and she tries her best not to think of how long it’s been since either of them were able to see eye to eye. She smears a hand over her mouth, steps away from him a few paces.

“What if I told you I can skip the war,” she says softly. “If I can make a large enough statement—”

His hand on her shoulder is a bolt of lightning through her whole body. She almost hits him, which is probably better than burning him to a crisp as she whirls back.

“Like burning down an orphanage?”

The outrage clenched like a fist around her ribcage, abruptly relaxes. He doesn’t move his hand. His voice is just as soft, but it’s with concern, not threat.

“Or a town? A peaceful, prosperous place that’s done nothing more than made itself a convenient target?”

His eyes are hazel.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t touch me if you think I’m just going to turn out like him.”

He takes his hand away.

-

If a Sun Summoner with two amplifiers could take the tops off mountains, a Saint with three can level them. There are no towns destroyed, no children left without parents (although Alina’s hands seem that much more red when she’s at the border, so forcefully is she reminded of the family she never knew, and the one that was taken from her).

She just rearranges the geography a bit. Her Cut leaves men blind these days; it carves new gorges into the earth as well, cracks and crevices that only grow in the telling as word of this new monster races north.

They send their own monsters back, at first. Alina’s people, twisted to serve _otkazat’sya_ needs. They burn up on contact, and it’s the first time she’s really been attacked since that day in the Fold. The first time she’s had to think about what death means to her, personally, with the chains of three amplifiers weighing down her soul.

She waits until she’s alone to throw up. Maybe for the dust of dead Grisha coating her skin, or maybe for the Darkling’s voice in her ears, whispering of eternity.

-

A group of children crash out of the Fjerdan capital in a stolen tank. The monsters stop coming, for a time.

-

There’s a boy who knows the secret of _parem._

The Darkling isn’t dead, and there’s a boy who knows the secret of _parem_. Or who might know, or has the means of knowing, and Alina looks down at her red-stained hands wondering how much more blood her decisions are going to cost the world.

Nikolai hasn’t found the Darkling, but he has found this boy.

-

“Lonely, isn’t it.”

She’s been waiting for this. Her fingers twitch with the urge to Cut, but even out here in the wilderness, swallowed by snow, she can’t be sure what she’ll hit.

So she turns instead, and there’s the Darkling. Leaning back on his hands, head pitched back towards the sky. His legs splay out before him, uncomfortably casual. She traces the long, pale line of his throat with her eyes.

No _kefta._ Breeches and a white cotton shirt. For a moment he seems like the picture of ease and Alina has never wanted to tear him apart more.

Then his head tips towards her, and she sees those red-rimmed eyes, the shadows scrawled under them. Those sharp cheekbones have turned jagged, the hollows of his cheeks hewing too close to his skull. Sweat darkens the shirt in patches, sticking to a torso worn uncomfortably thin.

He smiles at her, and his teeth glint in the light. “Have I satisfied your lust for misery yet, Alina?”

“You could die screaming and I wouldn’t be satisfied.”

He spreads his palms. “Evidently.”

Alina clenches her hands until they ache, and it still doesn’t stop the tremble running through her. “Where are you?” she spits.

“Here with you.”

“Don’t play games with me, Darkling. We’re both beyond that.”

“Oh,” he says, standing in a movement that is somehow too swift to be seen. “I don’t think we’re beyond much of anything these days, you and I.”

His gaze flickers only briefly down, but this doesn’t need words. Can’t have them, really, the horror she’s committed verging on unspeakable.

She thinks of Nikolai’s touch, withdrawing for her shoulder. She thinks she probably doesn’t deserved to be touched ever again.

Alina sucks in a shuddering breath. He’s closer now and she didn’t see that either but she can feel the heat of him. Like he’s really there and for an instant - not even a breath, something more and less than that all at once - she wants to sway into him.

“ _Don’t._ ” She’s raw inside and so his her voice. She reels away from him, tripping over her own feet in her desperation to get away from him. Mal’s blood is on her hands and _he killed Mal_ and she doesn’t even hate herself for wanting to take comfort, just for an instant, with someone who knows the cost of exactly what she’s done.

No, she hates herself because it’s weak. Because she has worked so hard for so long to remain stalwart, a pillar of some kind of strength because if she doesn’t have power she doesn’t have anything.

And then this monster shows up, this man, and she’s a girl screaming over a corpse again.

“Alina,” he says. She doesn’t know how he got there, but his pale hand is on her cheek, his breath stirring warm over her face. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Her Cut flares so bright, there are reports of seeing it as far as Shu-Han.

 _But I will_. His voice lingers, haunts, when the only thing left around her is ash. _It seems that’s what we’re destined for._


End file.
